


Three Valiant Efforts

by Papapaldi



Series: Series 12 [4]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Series 12, annnnngggssst, post Can You Hear Me?, the fam are done with this bs, three humans try to get a dumb alien to open up about her trauma, trippy nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:29:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22647184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Papapaldi/pseuds/Papapaldi
Summary: Three fears, three attempts to connect, and one stubborn alien who, despite the imprisonment of Zellin and Rakaya, is plagued by terrible nightmares.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair
Series: Series 12 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1647982
Comments: 22
Kudos: 172





	1. The Wrong Sort of Fear

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, so I know that episode 8 takes place directly after episode 7, but can chibbs please stop doing this!?!? Like, praxeus came right after fugitive and that could have been some great post episode angst for us to speculate about but NOoOoo, we have a canonical continuation >:(  
> So I'm pretending episode 8 happens later, fight me Christopher

There are certain things that you don’t realise are important until after the fact. Long after, sometimes, especially when it comes to fear. Fear stews deep down, unacknowledged. Little fears here and there knitting together into something insurmountable. Once you’ve seen it – once you’ve noticed – there’s no going back to blissful blindness. No ignoring it. 

You don’t realise just how tall things have piled up until they collapse, and you’re left in the middle of the wreckage. 

It’s usually easy for Ryan to put fear out of his mind, because with the Doctor, they’re always moving. Onto the next place, the next monster. They reel through adventures faster than ever before, wearing themselves out at each stop so that all they want to do upon returning to the TARDIS is make a beeline for their beds, and wake up to the next distress call, or strange energy signal, or idea for a getaway from the maestro herself. There’s no time for fear. Time for adrenaline, maybe, but not that deep, paralysing sort of fear. The kind that eats at you. 

No time to mull over things like the dregs, things like his own planet, reduced to dust and monsters. Things like the look in his best mate’s eyes when he talked about how hard things had been for him without Ryan. He’s not the sort of person who runs away, or at least, he always told himself he isn’t. When things get bad, you don’t just leave people to deal with it alone. He knows what it’s like to be the one left behind to pick up the pieces, to get on with normal life. To be left alone. His Dad did it to him, after his Mum, and after his Nan. Now he’s done the same thing to Tibo, been so tied up in his own rosy ambitions of adventure that he didn’t notice his best mate spiralling. Now he’s leaving again, and as usual, he doesn’t know when he’ll be back – or if he’ll be back. 

He hasn’t told Yaz exactly what he saw in his nightmare, same as she hasn’t told him hers. He talked to her, after they’d all said their goodbyes and slunk back off to the TARDIS, ready to run again. He doesn’t think she understands what he’s feeling, like he’s missing out on life, abandoning everything and everyone. He’s not like her, he can’t just drop back to Earth to the same time he left and pretend like nothing’s changed, like he hasn’t changed. Before the conversation could go anywhere, however, the Doctor butted in with a brand new idea for an adventure. Frankenstien, she’d said, though she got distracted by something else halfway through the journey, so she promised to put that particular idea on the back burner. It would be fun, their adventures always are. Brilliant, fun, distracting. Running. He knows the Doctor wants them along for the ride, because the longing in her eyes whenever she drops them off is palpable, like she’s barely holding herself back from smothering them all and begging them to stay. He thinks she’s scared of being alone. He can relate to that. 

He’s been wondering about that lately – just what the Doctor’s scared of. They’ve been trying to get her to open up for so long that the effort sits between them in every conversation, ignored, unacknowledged. Her, hoping they won’t pick it up again, and them, hoping she might for once give them something _.  _ She never does. 

So he wants to try again. 

Graham has already made an effort of his own, opening up about his cancer. Yaz and Ryan listened in upon that conversation, and it was frustrating to witness. 

In truth, Ryan has been grappling with disillusionment ever since their trip to Orphan 55, perhaps ever since a man on a plane revealed himself with a wicked grin to be the Doctor’s oldest enemy. It only intensified as the Doctor continued to grow cold and distant, snapping at him with her true age, and the true state of their relationship. She was right; they don’t know her, not even a little bit. She won’t let them, and yet she expects them to stay. A year ago he would’ve reminded himself that he was lucky to be travelling with her at all, that it was a privilege, but that feeling is beginning to fade. He thinks he deserves more, they all do. 

He corners her in the console room while the other two are in their rooms. She’s busying herself at the console under muted orange lights, the engines humming and whirring, sounds populating the mechanised drone. 

“Hey Doctor,” he says, stepping up onto the central platform, “whatcha doin’?” 

“Hiya Ryan,” she calls, turning to look at him with wide eyes. Panicked eyes, maybe, but he can’t be sure. She’s nothing if not difficult to read, despite her overeager expressions. Always animated, though you can never be sure with what. “Just doin’ some maintenance.” She says that a lot; maintenance, correspondence, correspondence about maintenance. It’s transparent, like she’s reaching out a hand for them to take. 

“Important stuff?”

“Very,” she nods importantly.

He hesitates, shuffling his feet, “oh, umm, should I go?”

She looks very much like she wants to say yes, with the way she’s hunching her back over the console, pressing her face close to the machinery she’s fiddling with. She pulls her head up out of the recesses of circuitry and glances over her shoulder. “Very important, unless you wanted something, in which case, it’s not important at all,” she beams. 

He nods, smiling politely. “I wanted to ask you something, actually.”. 

She winces; a minute twinge of the lips, a twitch of the eyelids. She straightens up and brushes her hands off against her coat, rocking on her heels. “Ask away,” she says. 

“You remember what you said when we got back from... err,” he can’t bring himself to say Orphan 55, now knowing what it really was, “Tranquility?” he says instead. “About time not bein’ fixed, that the future could be different?” 

“Yeah,” the Doctor nods. She’s all smiles, but there’s a flash of reluctance behind her eyes, and her hands are worrying at a loose strand on her coat sleeve. “And it is,” she adds, trying to reassure him, “just one possible future, nothin’ to worry about.” The Doctor said that a lot, that there was nothing to worry about, most often when there most definitely was. 

“But, I mean, it definitely seems to be the way things are goin’,” he presses, trying to lock her into eye contact. Instead, her eyes dart towards the console, as if itching to get her hands on the machinery. “No one’s really doin’ anythin’ about the world bein’ on fire,” he chuckles. The sound is heavy in his gut. “Look, it’s just that, err,” his turn to look down, because now she’s looking at him. Her gaze is inquisitive, mouth slightly agape and turned at the edge into half a smile. Maybe she thinks it’s encouraging, but the way her eyes are blazing and her muscles are twitching, he can tell that she’d rather be doing just about anything else. “In the whole finger-induced nightmare state, that’s what I saw. Just fire, everywhere, like the whole planet burnin’.” 

The thread on her coat snaps off in a harsh jerk of her fingers, which now have nothing left to do except burrow hungrily into the folds of the fabric, gripping at her arms so tight that her fingers quiver. “Just a nightmare, Ryan,” she assures him. It’s whispered, and she’s staring over his shoulder with a dark sheen over her eyes. 

“Yeah I know, just really freaked me out that’s all. The dregs were there too, walkin’ in the flames.” Caught up in the thrill of the chase, he hadn’t really taken the time to consider the dregs during their time at Tranquility. There was a moment when he and Yaz were running through the deserted corridors – a horde of snarling, skeletal monsters pouding out scraggly, clawing steps against the polished floors – that he allowed the truth to catch up with him. They were humans. People like him, twisted over time, shaped into callused, bone-carved beings over millennia of toxic air and arid soil. Skulls swollen and elongated into pointed masks, fangs splayed and sharp with ferocious hunger. He tried to ignore that image for a long while; the shapes of their heads turning through the air, sniffing them out, the sound of their ragged breaths beneath bent, jutting ribs. “I think they really got to me, you know, because they used to be us. I thought they were just like any other monster at first, but I just couldn’t stop thinkin’ about them.” 

“I understand,” she says, grip slacker on her arms, coming back to the present. “I’m sorry you had to see that.” Maybe she means well, she usually does, or at least seems to, but her comment only serves to irritate Ryan. The Doctor had known the truth about Orphan 55, and that was the worst part. Her lies were obvious, hanging bitter in the air like an awful aftertaste following that righteous speech of hers. As if she knows what it was like to see her entire race reduced to monsters, her planet to dust. Maybe she does. It isn’t as if they know her. She isn’t sorry that his planet was destroyed, she’s sorry that they saw something she wanted to keep hidden. She’s sorry she didn’t stick to her well-known tourist hotspots where she could show them what she wanted them to see, and nothing more. “It was only a possible future, promise. Some worlds,” and her grip tightens, white-knuckled, on her arms again, “they can be saved. Sometimes… Still –” she exclaims, suddenly bright again, though her fingers are still wrapped tightly around her forearms, “you lot go on survivin’, spreadin’ out across the stars, the great and bountiful human empire!”

“Yeah,” he shrugs, trying not to appear frustrated. The uber-rich packed on shuttles to the stars, while the rest of humanity are left behind in the waste to slowly evolve into dregs. Not exactly great and bountiful, though he supposes that’s how most empires are built. “There’s something else as well,” he adds, determined to quell his anger. Part of him wants to confront her about their trip to Orphan 55, tell her that they’re not stupid, that they all know she was lying. He doesn’t, because he wants to keep going along this path. He feels like he might be getting somewhere. If he shares enough, maybe she’ll feel inclined – obligated, maybe – to share as well. It hasn’t worked so far, but maybe this time will be different. He has to tell himself that, all of them do, lest they stop trying altogether. 

The Doctor inclines her head in invitation for him to speak. It seems that, at this point, she can no longer control herself, so she bends over the console with an intent expression on her face, fiddling with a spindly golden mechanism extruding from the surface. “Well, it was my mate Tibo, I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned him before you met him today.” He definitely has, but the Doctor doesn’t always listen when you tell her stuff, just like she isn’t listening now. She hums an affirmative but doesn’t elaborate. It’s very clear that she wants the conversation to be over, but Ryan’s not about to let her off that easy. “He’s been havin’ a hard time without me, I think. I mean, we used to do everythin’ together, have done since we were little kids. Me nan always used to say we were joined at the hip, used to go runnin’ about town all day long.” A wistful smile tugs at his lips, though the Doctor’s expression is hard and flat, staring down at the console, grip stiff on the rim. Unmoving. He falters, but presses on. “Well, anyway, with all this travellin’ I’ve been doin’, he’s been feelin’ alone. In a bad way, you know? At least he knows now why I was away, but I just feel like I’m missin’ out sometimes. Like I’m livin’ faster than everyone back home. These adventures – they’re brilliant, yeah? Don’t get me wrong – but they’re my whole life. I nip back home, catch up with me mates, and then it’s back out again. I quit the warehouse job, and who knows when I’ll ever go for me NVQ… sorry,” he mutters, “ramblin’. Thought that was your job,” he nudges the Doctor playfully, still staring rigidly down at her frozen hands. 

“Do you want to leave?” she murmurs, straightening up, examining him. Her eyes are sharp, penetrating. He feels the need to defend himself. 

“No, no,” he assures her, because the hint of vulnerability in her voice is jarring. He feels like he needs to stamp it out. It’s something that he isn’t supposed to see. “It’s just tricky, you know? Havin’ two lives, keepin’ track of time. I’m worried I’ll go back and they’ll all have moved on without me, or I’ll have changed so much that I don’t fit in anymore,” he pauses, voicing a deeper fear in guise of a joke: “sometimes I worry I’ll get back too late and they’ll all be dead,” he chuckles. He expects the Doctor to reassure him then, to make some indignant comment about her time machine piloting skills and how they’re very good, actually. She doesn’t. Her muscles go stiff, arms pressed to her sides like her lips, pressed together. Trembling. They quiver into a smile. 

“No need to worry about that, Ryan Sinclair,” she tries for her usual energy. All it does is make her seem tired. “I’ll get you home whenever you need. Seventy-seven minutes out, tops,” she grins. “Well, I say tops, there was this one time when I was twelve months out – but that was a long time ago!” she cries, at the sight of Ryan’s horrified expression. She’s lucky Yaz isn’t here to hear her say that. It’s one admittance he’s heard from the Doctor that he won’t relay to his best friend, because she stresses out about enough already. “I’m a way better pilot now,” she assures Ryan. 

“Err, Doctor,” he begins, because clearly the conversation isn’t going to get there without a little push. Organically, it’s wrapping itself up – or, perhaps, entirely by her design. “Are you doin’ ok? It’s just that, you’re a bit stiff,” he gestures vaguely towards her clenched fists and tensed shoulders. 

“Oh yeah,” she says, making a show of rolling her shoulders and slumping back into her usual lazy posture, “totally fine, yeah.” 

“It’s just that, I know you probably saw somethin’ too, when we were all captured on that ship. I just thought maybe… I don’t know, if you wanted to talk about it?” His voice softens throughout the sentence, trailing off into a murmur. He’s looking down at his shoes. He wonders inwardly why he’s so worried about meeting her eyes, standing his ground. Worried about what he might see in her eyes, maybe, like what he saw when she told him she’d lived so long she’d lost count. 

“Thanks Ryan,” she says. He finally looks, and sees her staring up at him with a weary smile. “But it was nothin’, really, only a couple seconds before I shook off the connection. I’m good with psychic stuff, got good defences.” She taps this side of her head with her finger, winking at him. He almost asks her to elaborate, but has a feeling she’s just trying to steer him off track. 

Maybe it was only a few moments in reality, but dreams happen much faster. The perception of days or weeks or even years all pressed into minutes, flickering away behind the eyes. It wasn’t just Tibo he saw in the fire, there were other friends too. Mates he played basketball with, colleagues, friends from high school – all of them old and worn and screaming at him for leaving them to burn. The light of the fire cast the dregs in shades of pale gold, flames licking at their tough, ridged skin, smoke swirling around their sharpened claws. They stalked him, and he ran, feeling the heat of the flames intensifying, heaving smoke into his lungs in choked gasps, feeling ash settle on his lungs. He looked down at his hands and saw that his skin was bubbling, hardening to callussed, marble white. Nails sprouted and twisted into gnarled and blackened claws and he felt his bones shudder and shift, sprouting from his back like roots from the Earth. He felt his skull swell and press against his head, his teeth stretch from a muzzled mouth into greying fangs. It was agony. He wandered the grey wastes, crying out for help with a mouth that could only roar, reaching with hands that could only rend.

The Doctor must have seen something too, but he’s wary of pressing the subject any further. It might only cause her to retreat deeper into herself, or to snap at him, remind him how old she is, and how insignificant he is compared to her. He doesn’t need reminding of that. 

“Yeah.” He chokes out the acknowledgement. She waits a tense moment before smiling, spinning on her heels, and getting back to work. She’s breaking apart one of the sheets of metal plating covering the TARDIS circuitry – completely separate to the one she was tinkering with before, hands seeming to rest upon the first patch of untouched metal they could find. Ryan rolls his eyes, and trudges back up the stairs, trying to ignore the sensation of heat swirling at his ankles like licks of flame. 

…

She didn’t lie, it really had only been a few seconds that she’d spent in the nightmare, though she thinks that Zellin and Rakaya (or Voldemort and Elsa, as she and her friends had nicknamed them) could have lived off the fear they captured in those fleeting moments for a very long time indeed. It was perhaps her greatest fear, and the most universal of all, patterned across just about every race. Death and the dark – in short, the unknown. She hates not knowing, always has. It’s far worse when others know, and she doesn’t. Worse, still, when the one who does know laughs in the spaces between her thoughts from somewhere far away, so quietly she can’t be sure whether or not he’s there at all. In the nightmare, she saw something wrenched deep from her subconscious, a sharp, white tower channelling violet spirals of energy, and a child, dwarfed beneath the structure, the shape their shadow cast across her mind achingly familiar… It was the secret that had set her best friend back over the precipice, and set her planet on fire. Supposedly, it was the most terrible secret ever discovered, and sometimes she thinks that finding out herself would be worse than the unknown. 

The Doctor dreams of fire. It’s why she doesn’t let herself sleep very often, because these images always have a way of finding her when she’s alone in the dark. It blends in streaming stokes against the orange sky, weaving amongst dark, crumbling structures and clouds of white ash. There are bones poking out amongst the rubble, and voices screaming at her from inside her head, psychic remnants of the dead. It brings tears to her eyes, the sight of the ruin, and the sound of them crying out. ( _ We waited for you).  _ But she was too late to save them. Their whole lives they waited for their hero to return, and she never did. ( _ The planet is burning, and you weren’t there).  _ Now the ghosts of their minds are scattered to the ether, growing twisted and monstrous and vengeful with every passing moment, like dregs, wandering the wasteland. If she stays here long enough, she’ll become one of them too. 

There’s a figure standing amongst the ruins, and for a moment the Doctor thinks it’s him, the one who did all this, but he’s too tall and too young. Too tiny. 

  
“I think you forget how powerful you are,” Ryan says, sarcasm wrought in every syllable, a smile curling his lips. “Lives change worlds,” he reminds her, like an echo turned sharp and chiding on the return. Words spat back. He takes a step closer, towering over her. “People can save planets, or wreck them,” he sneers. “That’s the choice.” With a grin, he disappears, and she’s standing in an orange haze. All around her, a barn is burning, the wood charring, blackening to soot and falling like snow, streaking her coat with grime. Before her, an ornate box sits, a jewel-like red button sitting tantalisingly un-pushed. She never could resist a big red button. She pushes it, and beneath her, the ground shudders and splits apart. In a haze of white and pain, the planet ceases to exist.  _ At least, _ she thinks,  _ it isn’t burning anymore _ .


	2. Alone in the Dark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for suicidal thoughts. It's not exactly explicit but be warned (I know this episode was difficult for a lot of people)

Yaz is full of fear, the good sort and the bad. She runs off adrenaline, using it to run from the deeper stuff. It’s a strategy she’s been using for a long time, so long that she doesn’t remember how not to do it. Travelling with the Doctor is all adrenaline, the sort she craved when she became a police officer. Sure, there was helping others – that was always her first reason for getting the job, still is – but she likes helping best when she can do it at a run. She likes helping best when it’s dangerous, heroic. Life or death. 

She’s spent a fair chunk of life feeling like she’s worthless. She was told so every day at school by just about everyone, thanks to Izzy Flint and her powers of manipulation. Ruling through fear. It came in the form of muttered taunts, snickering, and shoving in the hall. It came with the facebook posts and the group emails, the pictures left plastered all over the school. It came with the jabs at her religion, her culture, mimicking stereotypes, calling her a terrorist when the latest attack was put on the news. Asking her when she was joining Isis. It was everyday, and it was hell. Her parents didn’t understand, they were just cross with her for getting bad grades all of a sudden. They thought she was trying for attention, or else not applying herself. In fact, she was applying herself diligently to the task of not standing out. She was top of the class, and Izzy Flint didn’t like that. She was pretty, and she didn’t like that either. 

She was seventeen; no friends, no ambition, no future – though she wasn’t planning on actively changing that fact, even though it was always an option, in the back of her mind. A failsafe. Sitting in one place on the side of the motorway, she knew someone would find her eventually. If she’d really wanted to get away, she would have run a little farther. She would have actually gone through with what she set out to do, the failsafe. The thing that still flashes across her mind sometimes, unbidden and unexpected. The truth was she was desperate for someone to see her, to seek her, to prove that she was real and in pain. If they just left her to sit here, she thought she might just fade away in the night, and wouldn’t that be nice? 

But her sister had sought her out. Her stupid kid sister who had given up asking Yaz to watch dumb movies with her on the weekend because she spent so much time locked in her room. Sonya sought her out, showed her she was real, greeted her with tears in her eyes because her mind had jumped to the worst possible conclusion. They celebrated that day once a year, every year, with a home-cooked meal and a terrible movie. 

She promised Sonya, that day, that she would never leave her again. Assured her, over and over, that she was never going to do what Sonya had suspected she might. Never. 

Only, she did leave. Three secondments, then a sabbatical, never telling Sonya or her parents where she was going or what she was doing. Undercover, was what she said, and there was just enough pride in their hearts to win over the suspicion brewing away underneath. She can’t keep doing this forever, she’s not even sure she wants to go back to being a police officer, though today reminded her of the good that can be done by helping in small ways. No life or death – just patience and kindness. Help, without the sprint. It gives her hope that there might be a palatable life for her back home once she’s done travelling. If she’s ever done travelling. Ryan voiced his own thoughts on the matter, and though she tried to rebuff him, she knows he’s right. They have to choose. 

Whenever she thinks about this choice she’s reminded of the lonely look in the Doctor’s eyes when she left them behind in Sheffield the previous day, or of the small, desperate smile pressing through her mask as she gazed up at them when they all promised to stand by her side. She’s reminded of the gold stars and the adrenaline rush of laser fire, of running from danger, of whizzing through a space-age teleport and outsmarting alien foes. Of being like the Doctor. Taking charge. Wanting more, and getting it. 

That’s the good sort of fear, but more often these days, she’s been greeted with the old sort. The sort she used to feel everyday of her life. Crying out into the silence, no one there. Alone in the dark. The realm of the Kasaavin was like that. The feeling of death, gloomy pillars of spiralling dark-ridged flesh snaking up into pale smoke, the ground cold rumpled with undercurrents of roots sending snapping lights beneath her feet. She thought she was in hell. She was dead, and her family would never know. 

She felt the same sort of fear in her nightmare; alone in the pale grey sunlight, countryside stretching silent and watchful and indifferent in every direction. Sonya, telling her to get it right this time, to go through with that failsafe.  _ I didn’t call anyone, there’s no point,  _ she said, reminding Yaz of the truth. No point in calling someone to find her, because she was only going to run away and leave them all again.  _ You’re weak. You run _ . She was right, because Yaz is only ever happy when she’s running. She’s too weak to deal with being a normal person, always trying to prove herself, reach that little bit further into the dark. At her core, she thinks, she’ll always be that sullen teenage girl lashing out at the world the only way she can think of, by running from it, and daring the world to stop her.  _ No one’s coming. You’re alone in the dark. _ All of it came rushing forward, then, a tirade holding a life of pain and worthlessness. Voices in her head, eyes at her back, hands on her body, shoving her, tearing her apart. The sunlight on her face faded into night, cold air whipping at her hair as she slept on the roadside, waiting for someone to come for her. It was then, in the nightmare, that she realised the truth. She wasn’t real at all. No one cared enough to come for her, no one even knew she existed. Yaz, who so desperately wanted to prove herself, and to prove she was alive and breathing and capable, was no one at all. Alone in the dark. Dead, wandering in the gloom. 

They’re back on the TARDIS again. Rocking from adventure to adventure, trying to block out the memories of their nightmares. Ryan had told her that he tried to speak to the Doctor about his own nightmares, pried for a glimpse of her own, but had been shrugged off. That was to be expected, but Yaz can’t help but feel angry with her all the same. They went through hell, and it felt so real, and they’re just supposed to keep on going like nothing happened? 

“Doctor,” she says, hanging back inside the TARDIS console room after the boys have padded back along the hall to their rooms. Yaz is exhausted, as she always is after their adventures.Just the way the Doctor likes them, she thinks bitterly. The Doctor herself never seems to sleep, just work at that console all night, and in all the in-between moments of the day. Looking for the Master, apparently, though Yaz would never ask, not again. Apparently, she asks too many questions. Of late, the Doctor’s focus on her work has only intensified. She spends every spare moment fiddling with the ship’s mechanisms, a burning intensity in her eyes. Sometime she’ll leave them somewhere once she’s scoped the vicinity and deemed it safe. She often won’t return for hours, and always comes back covered in dirt, her cheeks flushed, like she’s been digging around in underground caves, or doing a lot of running. Yaz loves running about in underground caves, all that exciting stuff, but evidently she isn’t allowed in these particular caves, something which the Doctor pointed out a bit too harshly whenever any of them asked. 

“Hmm?” the Doctor hums at Yaz’s address, not looking at her. Yaz told the boys earlier what she planned on doing, upon which Graham had given her a wan, sympathetic smile, and Ryan had clapped her on the shoulder with a sarcastic mutter of ‘good luck.’

“I wanted to talk to you about something,” she blurts, not bothering to beat around the bush like Ryan had. If there’s one thing the Doctor is good at, it’s derailing a conversation, so Yaz isn’t going to give her the chance. 

“And what’s that,” she says, clearly struggling to bite back her irritation. Yaz feels a flush of anger come over her as still, the Doctor doesn’t look up. 

“Nothin’ big, just wonderin’ how you’re doin’?” she shrugs, stepping closer, relaxing her body language. Making herself appear unthreatening, unoffensive. She wants to make it very obvious that she’s expecting more than a mumble of ‘m’fine.’ 

“M’fine,” the Doctor mumbles, still bent low. 

“Seriously?” Yaz says, shaking her head. “You’re not fine, none of us are! We were just made to live through our worst nightmares,” she cries, experated. It comes out higher-pitched than she intended. 

The Doctor stands and turns to face Yaz, wearing a standoffish expression. It’s similar to the hard-pressed, reluctant smile she wore when the three of them had cornered her and asked her who she was. Great, she’s already on the defensive.  _ Time to change tactics _ , she thinks.

Yaz forces her expression to soften to one of wide-eyed vulnerability. The Doctor responds in turn, face suddenly working itself into a genuine smile. “Oh Yaz,” she says, “I’m sorry. I know it was really hard on you three. Is there anythin’ I can do to help?” she adds, hastily, as Yaz smiles weakly. “You humans like to talk about things,” she offers, “Ryan and Graham both had a little chat with me. I may not be a professional, but I am your mate,” she grins. 

_ Excellent _ , Yaz thinks. The Doctor really is trying her best. With both Graham and Ryan, she was so reluctant to converse that she’d all but turned them away with her silence and her stiff, reserved body language. Two tries later and she actually seems to have a clue as to what she’s supposed to say. “Ok, well, there was this time, a few years back, when I was in a really dark place, you know, mentally,” she struggles out. Although she ventured in with the intention to drag the Doctor into an inescapable conversation, one where she’d be forced to reciprocate, now that she begins to think on the feelings that nightmare has stirred up, she can’t help but feel lighter as she tells someone about it. The Doctor nods, biting her lip absently, obviously unsure of what to say. “I was gettin’ bullied, feelin’ directionless, mum and dad were a bit distant, you know, teenager stuff.” Yaz takes a moment to wonder if the Doctor  _ does  _ know teenager stuff. She tries to imagine the Doctor as a rebellious teen, but can’t quite get the picture in her head. “That’s what the nightmare was, just all these old feelings from this time at the height of it all when I ran away from home. I think it was trying to show me that I’m still the same now as I was then – still tryin’ to escape. Except, in the nightmare, no one came for me. I just sat there alone forever and no one even cared I was gone.”

The Doctor smiles sympathetically, but stays silent. At one point she opens her mouth, but bites back whatever she’d been about to say almost immediately, a comfort thought better of. 

“It’s okay,” Yaz reassures her silent partner, “it just made me realise some stuff, like how I’m runnin’ away again now from a different sort of feelin’. It’s like, I don’t want to settle and just stay in one place for my whole life. I want to do something important, something real. Travellin’ with you gives me that,” she sighs, flashing the Doctor a rushed smile. The Doctor simply stares at her, swallowing hard as her neck strains. Her eyes are distant, and her smile wan. This expression has become almost a default state for her lately, at any time her hands aren’t busy fiddling. “Do you know what I mean?”

“I know exactly what you mean,” she says quietly. 

“I know I can help people back home too, you know, doin’ little things that make a big difference, like everyone else. There’s somethin’ different about savin’ entire planets, though,” she beams.

“Yeah,” the Doctor says, the sound hollow and drawn out. 

Yaz fixes her eyes on the Doctor, her gaze averted to the console as if longing to spring back to it and continue whiling away the hours. “I used to think I could never go back to bein’ a regular police officer after seein’ all this stuff with you, but I think I understand the small ways of helpin’ a little better now, like maybe it wouldn’t be so horrible,” she chuckles. She expects the Doctor to add some inspirational quote about the quiet endeavours of humanity, about small actions leading to incredible change, but she doesn’t. 

All she does is stare Yaz in the eyes with a pleading look, “are you gonna leave?” She tries to sound casual, but it comes off panicked. The words come out too fast, stumbling to get out. 

“No, no way,” she says, recalling Ryan saying that the Doctor had asked him the same question, and that he had given her the same hasty answer. Ryan might be unsure of his place on the TARDIS at the moment, but Yaz isn’t. She won’t be leaving the Doctor’s side any time soon, though someday soon she will have to choose, or at least limit their travelling. Maybe a short trip a week, a few days away in the middle of the month, dropping back for the Monday shift with her head still screwed on straight, and no one the wiser. Little lost moments, so her life and relationships won’t suffer for it. Yaz wonders if the Doctor will accept a proposition like that, something so formal, so close to the mundane. Treating her like a vacation opportunity rather than a friend. The Doctor’s right about one thing; they can’t just disappear for weeks and come back after a moment has passed, people are good at noticing when things are off. “I’m not leavin,’” Yaz reiterates, and watches the Doctor’s shoulders relax. “Doctor,” she ventures, and at her tone, the Doctor tenses once more. Defences raised. “Is that what you’re scared of, bein’ alone?” 

Her nose twitches, and her eyes suddenly become restless in their wandering, fixing on the lights, the floor, the console, her absently twisting fingers. “Well, I don’t exactly like it,” she admits, “but I if you’re askin’ about my nightmare, I already told Ryan, I didn’t see anythin’.” It’s obvious in her hesitation that she’s lying, as obvious as it was after Orphan 55 when she said she hadn’t known about the planet’s true nature until just before they did. 

“Promise?” Yaz asks, trying to trap her, appealing to a sense of friendship she hopes is still there.

“Promise,” the Doctor answers, and Yaz can barely hold back a scowl. 

…

The Doctor dreams of loneliness. It greets her like an old friend, one she likes to think she hasn’t seen in a long while, but realises in its familiarity that it’s always been there, just ignored. She felt it as a child, until she met the Master, and she felt it again when she ran from home. She felt it afresh in her hearts everytime she lost someone dear to her, and went searching longingly, desperately, for the next. Only this time around, the loneliness hitched a ride. Despite her three best friends, she was lonelier than ever. They don’t trust her, can’t talk to her, don’t even want to travel with her anymore, if her suspicions are right. Ryan’s worried about his mates and his life back home, Yaz is tired of running for selfish reasons, and Graham, well, he’s getting old, and she doesn’t do well with mortality. She and it are in disagreeance over a fair few matters. 

In the dream, she’s a boy again, curled up under a rough, scratchy mattress, tear stains running down his cheeks. 

_ You’re weak.  _ Someone says. The boy pokes his head out from under the covers and dries his eyes on small, weary hands. His body quivers, tiny chest heaving with panting breaths. He’s always been scared of the dark. He shifts himself up into a sitting position and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. A hand closes, sharp and cold, around his ankle. He gasps, and a familiar voice says,  _ no one’s comin’.  _ Suddenly the hand gripping him is gone and a girl stands beside his bed. She wears dark, tight-fitted clothes, looking strange amongst the mud and hay. 

From his future, a voice whispers ‘Yaz,’ though the boy doesn’t know what it means.  _ You’re alone in the dark,  _ the girl says, gazing down at him with black, gleaming eyes. 

The vision twists and The Doctor sits in her TARDIS console room, perched upon the edge of the stairs. On the platform above her, her three friends stare, though their faces are muted and dark, as if moulded from clay. 

“Don’t talk to him like that!” Yaz exclaims.

“Yeah, I’m not havin’ that,” Ryan says, glaring down at her, “We know who you are, alright,” he shrugs, almost apologetic. “You’re a monster.” Yaz and Graham nod their agreement. 

“We know what you did,” Yaz says, arms crossed in signature PC Khan authority. 

“And we don’t wanna have nothin’ to do with that,” Graham adds. 

She looks down at herself and sees that her body is old and frail. She wears a grizzled brown leather coat, a tattered belt around her waist. Her gnarled, wrinkled hands are drenched in blood. 

“You’re on your own this time,” Yaz says, with a slight smile, “no one’s comin’.” 

She disappears and the Doctor looks down again to find her latest body returned to her, young and sporadic. Grease-streaked and blood-free. Alone. On the console, a warning light flashes, and she’s just about to turn around and tell them not to worry when she remembers that they’ve left her. But she needs them, she needs their wonder to live. If she forgets what it’s like to gaze out at the universe for the first time, she might starve on the scraps of dreariness. Loneliness. She’s lived too long, and she needs their wonder like the Eternals need their nightmares  _ (s _ _ o entitled. So spoiled. You never clean up after yourselves).  _

Now it’s just her, alone on the battlefield where everyone else has fallen. Just wanting to let go, wanting to rest. To lose, just this once.  _ Do it right this time,  _ a voice echoes – not just Yaz, but all of them. Everyone she’s ever left behind in the trenches. Why had she ever thought she could do this again? Why did she even try? One more lifetime, that’s what she said, wasn’t it? Just one more. 

  
She was trying to do better, this time around, stay a few extra steps ahead, keep a few extra lengths between herself and her friends. She’s made a lot of promises over the years, so many that the term has lost its meaning. She promised to see every star in the universe with her best friend, she promised not to interfere in the affairs of the ‘lesser species’. There were others, more recent, like promising to guard a body for a thousand years, promising not to get Bill Potts killed, promising to never be cruel or cowardly. Promising Yaz that she isn’t scared of being alone, of waiting by the roadside, hoping someone will come for her – and no one ever coming, because no one cares to try. She’s distanced herself so much from them that they don’t even know what’s wrong. She’s being so cruel to them that they’ve almost stopped trying.  Love is a promise, but she’s broken that too. 


	3. Scared Without Her

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah I wrote and published it all in one day, what of it... I have no life :((  
> But I don't care! Because this dumb space story about a dumb space idiot makes me feel things!!

The Doctor never did come back to Graham with that reassuring comment she promised him. He knows she’s awkward, and that she cares about them all, but he can’t help but wonder if she was really trying at all. Maybe it was the concept of human mortality that made her uncomfortable – hell – humans have a hard enough time discussing it as it is. If her species can really change their forms at death and go on living for thousands of years (which is far too long for Graham to even deign to consider) then maybe death is a tricky subject for the Doc to wrap her head around. 

Being forced to think about his cancer again was scary. It’s something that sits, stewing at the back of his mind in every waking moment, wondering what it’s doing there, inside his body; resting or replicating. Dormant, or killing him. Again. He still sometimes feels like he’s living on borrowed time, like he shouldn’t really be here, seeing all these incredible things, especially when Grace isn’t here to share them with. She was the worst part of his nightmare, her anger, her cold indifference. It was such a stark contrast to the Grace he remembered that he knew he must have done something truly terrible to invoke that sort of mood in her. Something like letting her fall to her death from an industrial crane. 

The dream, as dreams often did, felt like it went on forever. A couple of hours, he had to live, and in that time he felt the full effects of the cancer raging through his body, consuming him with rabid hunger until nothing was left. Intravenous drip clumsily pushing life into his body while the rest of him withered around the chemicals and machinery they wove through him like thread, holding him together. His skin softened, his stomach churned, his skin deflating to stretch tight over bone. His pallor was pale, clammy, fading into the white of the bedsheets and all the while she stood over him, no smile on her face. No warmth. No Grace, just a nurse counting down the minutes to his death, and telling him he deserved it, because of what he had done to her. 

When he died, when the monitor let out that final, droning tone, the scene faded into darkness and he was falling through the night sky. His arms were tangled in heavy-duty wiring, and above him, a red wrought crane grew smaller and smaller as the wind rushed past, and the ground grew ever closer. Upon impact, he felt his body break. He was scared, even though he promised her he wouldn’t be. He was scared without her. 

He knows that Ryan and Yaz have already made attempts of their own to break through to the Doc. Maybe he should feel guilty about discussing her behind her back, but they’ve been at it for so long now it’s almost second nature. She’s been hiding something for a long time now. For a while, they thought things were alright again, after that scare with the Judoon, but now, after their nightmarish incursion back on home soil, the Doctor is back to her old, secretive ways. All of them, in fact, are still a little shaken from confronting their worst fears, but they’ve all had the bright idea to talk it out with one another, whereas the Doctor has been adamantly tight-lipped on the subject, as she is on any subject regarding herself. 

He still wants to try. 

He once thought himself the senior of their little pseudo-family – not the smartest, mind, but definitely the oldest. The Doc’s revelation that she was thousands of years old was a shock, though maybe it shouldn’t have been, given all her offhand comments about spending centuries in different places, and all her jokes about being a man. They were easy to ignore for Graham, because they were too strange to consider. Now he’s been forced to do just that, but he still fancies himself an adult alongside her, even if he is only a fraction of her age. 

“Hey there Doc,” he greets her, similarly to the others – catching her alone at work on the console. 

“Hey Graham,” she says with a grunt, working a spanner around a particularly stubborn bolt. He’s no mechanic, but he reckons there’s no real reason for her to be pulling things apart that he only just saw her fix up the day before. 

“Still doin’ maintenance?”

“Always,” she smiles, pushing her hair out of her eyes, “lots to do when maintainin’ a time ship.” From deep below the darkened floors, the engines give an almighty shudder, the lights around the walls blinking, and a whirring coming from the console’s centre. “Shut up,” the Doctor mutters under her breath. 

“Got a sec to talk?” he ventures. 

“Oh, umm, yeah I suppose,” she says, voice growing quieter with each stalling word. She leaves the bolt half undone and stands up straight, her hair frizzled in silver coils at her forehead. “Oh no!” she exclaims, palming her forehead theatrically, “I totally forgot about that reassurin’ thing I was meant to say! I’m really sorry Graham, I’ve been busy with maintenance.” Again the ship lets out a barrage of beeps and groans. The Doctor aims a kick at the base of the console and straightens up again with a grin plastered across her face. “Really sorry,” she says again.

“All fine Doc,” Graham smiles. “Listenin’ is the important part anyway, and you’re great at that.” He doesn’t mean for it to sound bitter, but maybe it does, a little, seein’ that all she does is listen when the conversation gets anywhere near serious territory. “It’s about those nightmares we had on the ship.” Although he says ‘we’, she doesn’t correct him. She just looks tired. “I didn’t tell you before, but it weren’t just the cancer that came back, Grace was there too.”

“Oh,” she blunders, “oh Graham I’m sorry.” 

“No, no,” he assures her, “it’s alright, human mind is great at torturin’ itself, like Voldemort said,” to his relief, she lets out a chuckle at that. “I just realised something, that’s all. I’m still guilty about it, Grace’s death, that is. It’s just… I should’ve stopped her climbin’ that crane – and obviously,” he adds hurriedly, as the Doctor opens her mouth to refute his claim, “obviously I can’t change that now,” though he had wondered about that, with the Doctor having a time machine and all. There was a conversation, back in the early days, things about rules of time and being able to see them. Back then, all awe, he’d taken in every word she said, but now, after seeing just how flexible the Doc’s rules are, he can’t help but wonder. “I realised that I’m still running from the grief, even after all this time. It started out as a way to distract myself, bit unhealthy, maybe, but what way of coping with grief is,” he chuckles. “It’s just that, Doc, I know you’ve lost people in the past.” He waits a moment to gauge her reaction, wondering if she’ll close herself off. The most they’ve ever gotten out of her about her family was during that conversation after Grace’s funeral, and only, he suspected, because she felt sorry for him. She said she’d lost them all a long time ago, but never anything concrete since. There was something about having sisters and five grandmas, but that was about it. Maybe that’s what her fear is, same as him, guilt for not being there when whatever happened to them struck. It built off of Yaz’s suspicions that the Doc’s fear was of ending up alone. It would explain why she’s so reluctant to tell them anything, because it would mean admitting to them in words how much she needs them. 

The Doctor squeezes her eyes shut just a moment longer than a blink, almost like a wince of pain. 

“And I just thought,” he ploughs on, “how do you cope with that? I try to carry Grace’s spirit with me. I try to be brave like her, I really do, but all this travelling… does it really help?” 

She sighs, running a sweaty palm through her messy hair, slicking it back from her forehead. For a moment, Graham wonders whether he’s gone too far. “I started travelling before I lost them you know – not that I did a runner,” she adds, at the shocked look on Graham’s face. “I’m not that much of a terrible parent. More of an end-of-first-life crisis,” she grimaces, and tries to pass it off as a genial smile. “I love it out here, though, seein’ all this. Helpin’ people, that’s how I cope.” Her hands are shaking, and Graham wonders whether she’s coping at all. There’s red dirt caked under her fingernails. 

“Look, Doc, I know the other two have already asked, and I don’t wanna pry, but if you had seen something that scared you – something like we all did – you’d tell us, right?” 

“Course I would,” she smiles, strained. “But I didn’t, so I won’t.” Short, sharp, and shiny, in the way her teeth glint in the golden light as she turns back around to face the console. 

Minutely, Graham sighs, and wonders when all this stops for her. The lies, the pretending. Maybe she’s been at it so long that she doesn’t know how to stop. 

…

The Doctor dreams of her family. It’s not her fault she’s so susceptible to the human’s psychic interference, Zellin and his detachable robot fingers messed with all her inner circuitry, frazzling her synapses, tearing down her walls. Now, as they dream, the lingering fears of her friends are cacophonous, breaking into her mind and resonating with her own. 

Her memories flick back, as if through a photo album – everyone she’s lost or left behind, dead to her memory. Bill is asking her why she broke her promise and Nardole chastises her for breaking her sacred oath. River is asking why she didn’t find a way to save her, and Clara asks why she left her alone in the universe, a dead thing, running. Amy and Rory are saying she never tried hard enough to see them again. Donna asks how she lives with herself after taking away everything she loved, and Sarah Jane asks why she never came to visit her before she died. Companions she’s known, in varying states of that mercilessly quick human decay, asking her why she abandoned them. The truth is, most of her family were never lost at all, they simply moved out of the house, and she could never be bothered with the emotional effort it cost her to visit, and to watch their lives rapidly bleed away. Those surrogate families weren’t lost, but left, intentionally, when they stopped playing by her rules, because she doesn’t do goodbyes. 

She dreams of what might be considered her real family, though nothing on Gallifrey ever really came close – except Susan, of course, though that guilt is so constant its appearance barely stirs her. She hears a race crying out, gold-collared Time Lords and the Gallifreyans forced to live in their shadow, all of them blurred into one great, teeming mass, asking her why she left them undefended and unruled at the end of time. Why she left them vulnerable, when the pieces left behind by the Time War were still being picked up off the ground. 

The vision fades from a crowd of shrouded, screaming figures, to something far more tangible. Far more familiar. She’s lying on a bed, this time in her own body. She panics as her memory is cast back to Resus One, blinded by pain, losing control. She sits up in a jerky motion that sends a pulse of pain through her body. It fades from burning intensity to a dull, sickly ache as she shudders, blinking around at the room. White and clinical, smelling of sickness badly covered up with antiseptic and air fresheners. A hospital. She hates hospitals. Bit ironic, considering the title she chose for herself. 

“Don’t try to get up, love,” a kindly voice calls out. The Doctor focuses her groggy vision on the figure of an approaching nurse. 

“Why am I here?” the Doctor rasps, finding her throat to be raw and crackling from disuse. “Where am I?”

“This is a hospital,” the nurse explains patiently. The Doctor blinks again, trying to get her eyes to focus. She sees a stout woman with a kind face, smile lines carved deep into her dark skin. 

“Grace Sinclair-O’Brien,” the Doctor murmurs, “the first face this face saw.” Usually she kept ahold of them a little longer; Rose, Amy, Clara. Not Grace. She’d let die her straight away. 

Grace smiles. Patient, pitying. “You’re dying.”

“Pfft, nah, can’t be. Dyin’s for other people,” she chirps. 

“Ah, Doctor,” Grace says.

“Yup, that’s –” she begins.

“Here,” an entirely new voiced answers. An entirely familiar voice. “Hello there, love,” the Master croons, clothed in blue scrubs and a white coat, “I’m the Doctor.” 

“Why are you here,” the Doctor scowls, shrinking backwards on the bed. 

He leers over her bedside, holding a clipboard in the crook of his elbow. “Because you’re dying, and I’m here to watch it happen.”

“I’m not,” she says, affronted. “I’ll just regenerate,” she grins, eyebrows raised. Banter. 

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible, love,” the Master sighs, feigning disappointment, A smile forms in the corner of his mouth. “Thirteen lives is all you get.”

“I’ve got a new cycle, probably more than that, actually, there was quite a lot of energy poring through that temporal crack.”

“Exactly,” he sneers, “you’re way overdue.”

“What do you mean?” 

“For someone so adamantly opposed to immortality, you certainly seem determined to cling to life. Careful now,” he tuts, “you don’t want to end up like me, desperately clinging to life by any means necessary. For all your talk of dying heroically, of standing and falling, you always survive. Funny, that,” he chuckles.  _ I’m scared,  _ a confession echoes in her head.  _ I’m actually scared of dying. _

“Oh,” the Master smiles at her discomfort, the curling of her lips, “there it is. Fear looks good on you. I think I might stay here and watch it simmer.” 

“I can’t die,” she says, hollow. To her horror, it’s almost pleading.

He laughs. “You sound like a human – but that’s why you like them young, isn’t it? You’re like someone who buys a puppy and abandons the dog when it gets too big for you to handle. Sure, sometimes the dog is found by someone nice, or finds a home itself, but more often than not it just sits there and withers away on the roadside, barking up at the sky, hoping you’ll come back.” He taps his pen against his clipboard. Four beats. Four knocks. He walks away, humming to himself. 

Something’s eating at her, something from inside. It’s in her cells, spreading poison through her body like curdled roots, twisting between her veins, her bones, her muscles. Choking her from the inside. She can’t speak, or move, or breathe. She’s paralysed, pale and slick with sweat soaking into the bed. Grace stares down at her as she dies, just as it should be. The first face this face saw. 

_ Why didn’t you save me?  _ she says, angry and cold. She tries to splutter an apology, but her throat has been ripped raw, vocal chords disintegrated, muscles spasming in an all-encompassing quiet tremor. A final protest. Even if she could apologise, what would it mean? She’s given so many meaningless apologies, made so many meaningless promises. Told so many lies.

This isn’t how Time Lords are supposed to die. The wither peacefully, their consciousness slowly fading, waiting for their turn in the confession dial, waiting to join their friends and family in that big, shiny computer underground. An inverted heaven. What’s happening to her now is, she realises,  _ human.  _ That’s when she notices that she only had one heart, and it’s stopping. 

She’s said before that regeneration feels like dying, but she said that as someone who’d never tried it before. Dying is worse, because there’s no welcoming light waiting for her on the other side. It doesn’t envelop her consciousness and burn it away, death to birth in one brilliant, burning moment. Cells flaring out in a final symphonious chord, and settling into a new combination. The terror of dying, to the terror of birth. To her, they’ve always gone hand in hand, so when she feels her consciousness slipping away without the hum of regeneration to play her out, no golden glow, no approaching light, she’s overwhelmed by the wrongness of it. The last thing she sees is Grace, smiling down at her...

And wakes up in a cold sweat. She reaches up and fumbles for her wrist, the double pulse beat sending a shock of relief through her. Not dying. Not human. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers into the dark, because she can. 

She sits up, blue duvet cover crumpling down around her thighs. Her coat, socks, and suspenders lay at the edge of the bed in a pile. She doesn’t usually sleep as often as she has been, and she rarely bothers to come all the way to her rarely-used room, or even take her shoes off. She nods off under the console, or on one of the library chairs. Beds are too much of a commitment to staying unconscious. 

The Doctor pulls the covers off her and swings her legs over the edge of the bed. She goes to stand, placing one bare foot on the cold, metal-grated ground, when a hand grabs her ankle. She freezes, a shiver shooting down her spine, a shudder escaping her lips.  _ I could tell you what I discovered,  _ the Master’s voice mutters,  _ but why would I make it easy for you?  _ When she looks down, the hand becomes a filthy rag, squeezing her flesh so hard she feels her toes going numb. From inside her head, it laughs;  _ she doesn’t know.  _

It’s the worst part, not knowing. Not knowing why Gallifrey had to burn, not knowing the truth about the timeless child. Not knowing herself, or the lives she’s lived, upon meeting a face she doesn’t recognise. Not knowing if her friends are going to stay much longer, when she won’t answer a single one of their questions. 

She wakes again, this time in a more likely location. She’s curled up at the base of the TARDIS console, back bent against the crystal-hewn structure, head tilted down awkwardly against her chest. There’s a screwdriver – a real one, for once – held loosely in her grip, with the rest of her tools littering the ground around her. None of her friends have found her, so she won’t have to endure any lectures on the importance of sleep. None of her friends have found her, so she won’t have to make up an excuse to explain the fear in her eyes, and the way her hands are still shaking. 

Her friends are worried about the duality of their lives, hiding their travels from their friends and family because the knowledge of aliens and time travel would be too much for them to handle. She’s worried too, hiding her true endeavours from her friends; a dual life. She spends one taking them out on adventures, and the other searching across the cosmos, trying to unravel a mystery. She spends it sifting through the ruins of an ashen planet, and searching the deepest recesses of the dimensions for that laughter that still rings in her ears, whenever she lets things get too quiet. She’s letting things slip with them just like they’re letting things slip with their friends. Relationships strained under the weight of secrets, bad excuses, popping back after a few minutes with a spotted memory and a new haircut – or, in her case, with a suntan and red dust clinging to her skin. If she can just solve it, she can leave that dual life behind, go back to the way things used to be. In the back of her mind, she knows, that whatever the truth is – the truth that drove the Master to burn their home to the ground – it will change her. She knows that things can never go back to the way they were – but it’s not as if she can just ignore the mystery. She is, after all, terrified of the unknown. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> eyyy it's done, what did you think?

**Author's Note:**

> So here's Ryan chapter, and there'll be one for Yaz and then Graham :)) I just love these characters, and I love the insight we got into them with this weeks ep!


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